Hard-drive makers push fundamental limitsNews & Analysis 6/29/2000 Post a commentRecent talk of approaching fundamental limits in hard disk storage have fueled the hopes of those pushing such alternative approaches as optical storage, holographic storage, perpendicular recording and atomic probe storage. The market involved is huge. More than $40 billion worth of hard disk drives and subsystems were sold last year. Prices per megabyte have been falling by a factor of two per year; capacity per disk has risen at the same rate. Any roadblock to continued progress in this techn

Europe gains as consumer electronics leaderNews & Analysis 6/28/2000 Post a commentThe pull for mobile connectivity is tugging the center of activity of consumer electronics design from Japan and the United States to Europe. In enclaves like Lund, small university town 300 kilometers south of Stockholm, engineers like Michel Saboune of Ericsson are brewing up concepts for families of wireless gadgets in which beefy CPUs take a backseat to clever design in RF, miniaturization and user interfaces.